Well, it was Wednesday night, so it was fuzzy bathrobe and bunny slippers night at the Casita des Zapatos. Bravo is torturing the Project Runway fans with a week of repeats, so the new CW (what ever that stands for, but I don't think it's Country/Western) came to the rescue with the two-hour premier of season 7 of America's Next Top Model. Sigh. Pour the cosmos, bitches.

I'm not going to dis the show and say that it's gotten formulaic, or anything (much) but last night we found out that there were more girls with sorrowful backstories than not. There's the girl who was in a plane crash when she was nine, and her mother's dead body kept her warm enough to survive. WHOA, doggies. Issues? A couple? You think, maybe?

There's the girl who is darker skinned than all of her other family members, and so she's the outcast for being the most colored person of color. Miss Jay, Tyra and Nigel all got jiggy wit dat. Ohhhh, I'm sorry. Slap me now. But they did. The only person on the panel who looked as puzzled as I felt was Twiggy.

There's another girl who is a cervical cancer survivor, and another one whose momma dropped her off at Child Protective Services (after they left the homeless shelter) and never came back for her. She, in her own words, went from homeless to homecoming queen. She was the Very First Person of Color to be homecoming queen in her hometown. Now, I don't remember where she was from, but children, the first Black homecoming queen in my hometown was voted in only five years after desegregation. I'm just saying. It's been a long, long, long, long time since I was in high school. I'm just sayin'.

In the role first made popular by Camille, and then improved upon by Eva-The-Diva, and continued in every season after, that of the de riguer Black Bitch, we have some ho who pretended to pee on another girl's bed, just so she could "mark [her] territory." That was after someone else had claimed the bed, mind you. Same girl also refused to take less than an hour-long shower, clean up after herself or in any other way be a nice roomie. I'm betting she gets the boot sooner than later, because Mr. Jay (who, was it just the settings on my teevee, or is he a little less orange this season?) will NOT stand for that sort of behavior on HIS sets. Hmmmph. Flounce.

Speaking of flouncing, those nasty, nasty Aswirl Twins were back, and I hope only for a two minute guest shot. Yeah... back to the bitches.

We had the stripper who wasn't a stripper, she was an ENTERTAINER, beeyotch. There's the prettiest girl in school, the delusional dog, the rocker chick. We had the mousy little good Christian girl who wouldn't do the nude shot because nobody should ever get to see her woman parts except her husband and God, and that includes herself (as one of the other hos so rightly noted). And we have our first set of twins, and as much as they have babboon noses, they turned it out in front of the cameras, and I'm betting that one or both get into the finals. The fact that they are twins confused some of the other girls who couldn't quite figure out if that made the twins one or two contestants. There's the mommy whose idea of the all-American family goes like this: I'm a model, I have two kids and my husband is in the military...in Iraq. There's an Indian girl from down the highway from me... Homestead, Florida. Indians in Homestead? Hondurans, Mexicans, Guatamalans, si... but a sub-continent Indian? How the hell did HER family end up in Homestead? And where does she eat when she's in town?

So. First we get snaps on the runway, the LAX runway. Then we do the interviews. Then we had the first rough cut and the next batch of girls get taken to an LA rooftop for some nude shots. That separates some of the chaff, but not all. Next up in our whirlwind first epi, the girls get dragged off to some warehouse or another for a fashion show. They get to see some boy models (any one of whom is prettier than any one of the girls) strut down the cat walk, then they have to take the outfits off the boys, fem them up a little and restrut. Melrose (long in the tooth) wins by a mile. This will come back to bite her in the ass. Note to next season girls: don't win in the early contests.

Short interlude where we see the cool new house, and discover that in two days these young things can make a show house look like a frat house at the end of the semester. What fucking pigs! Who raised these girls? Right. Dead mother, absent mother, and a minister.

Since we don't have Janice to kick (the girls) around any more, Tyra tried to chanel the Divine Miss D. herownself to show the girls how a real alcoholic psycho bitch diva behaves on set. Then, in what Mr. Jay claimed to be The Most Controversial Shoot on ANTM EVAH!!! (would that be even more controversial than, say... the super-hero alien shot? Or the girls on an elephant? That was pretty edgy and controversial, wasn't it?) the girls all get to be model stereotypes.

This is actually a very cool concept, and the baboon-nosed twins nail their shots of anorexic an bulemic models. The resident psycho bitch gets to be Naomi Campbell and throw a cell phone at an assistant, but can't pull it off. Go figure. Squinty-eyed rocker girl gets to be Gia (yeah, they were saying Janice, on set, I'm betting.) and cop a nod with a bottle of Jack in her hand. There's a dumb blonde (Paris?) and the girl who won't get out of bed for less than 10K, the fabulous bitch with the tiny dog and the entourage (who was made up to look like Eva the Diva, IMHO) and a handful of others too boring to remember.

Melrose finds herself in the bottom two, the other girl gets sent home. I don't remember who won. Bulemic twin? Next week, MAKEOVERS!!!!! (and, more importantly, a new episode of Project Runway.)

PS: Where's POTES over at Television Without Pity? This new guy/girl can't hold a candle to Potesie... TWOP? Call me.

So the POTUS doesn't know what "degrading to human dignity" means. I have a couple of ideas, and I'm sure you do, too. I'd love to be given the chance to show him some of my ideas, up close and personal, if you know what I mean, and I'm sure you do.

Feel free to add your ideas in the comments.
1. being forced to watch the POTUS's speaches on an endless loop

2. having to listen to Paris Hilton defend her singing or having to listen to her sing

3. being forced to watch Eraserhead on an endless loop

4. being forced to watch highlight reels from Project Runway's Santino and Jeffrey-the-Pinheaded-Shmoo pieced together with highlights from America's Next Top Model's own Jade-the-Delusionial

PS: Click on the image below to order your free bumper sticker.

Avast, ye seadogs, we be havin' too much fun today.

Yarr.

Oh, you all know that sometimes, just sometimes, I'm a sucker for a meme. When it has to do with art or books or music, I'm only too happy to play along. So. From Miss Bliss to me and then to five of you:

1. One book that changed your life: Walter Pater's Conclusion to the Renaissance

2. One book that you’ve read more than once: The Bushwhacked Piano

3.One book you’d want on a desert island: The Baroque Cycle

4. One book that made you laugh: The Joyous Season

5. One book that made you cry: The Once & Future King

6. One book that you wish had been written: Oh No, Ho; You Are NOT Doing That In Public

7. One book that you wish had never been written: The Celestine Prophecy (Truly, Deeply, Awful)

8. One book you’re currently reading: Hacking Moveable Type (pathetic, isn't it?)

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: The Complete Diaries of Samuel Pepys

10. Now tag five people: RJ, Mild Child, Jade, Marceeah, Larry

Boy-HOW-dee, was last night the best Project Runway, EVER, or WHAT?

They really, really had me going with Laura's reference to the Olsen twins, and the clip of Heidi saying there'd be two special guests. The fan blogs/forums had been rife with speculation about why the "special benefits to winning a challenge" line was dubbed in and what those special benefits could possibly be. Last night we found out, with a vengence.

The show opened with the three boys left standing (Kayne, Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo, and Michael) all congratulating themselves and each other about still being there. Kayne and JTPS are just ripping on Vincent being gone, and laughing and laughing and laughing about him going home. Maybe that was gloating, gloating, gloating. Whichever. And Jeffrey being Jeffrey, he has to bring up how happy he still is over the fact that Angela is gone and he won two challenges, but mostly, Angela is gone.

Over in their room, the girls are much better behaved, and Laura is just beaten down by pregnancy, the criticism of the other designers, pregnancy, stress and her last week's review on the runway. Noooooo. We love you, Laura (especially with your hair loose). Just put on a little lipstick and get back in the game.

At the studio, or Parsons, or the runway, or where ever the hell Heidi gives them their next challenges, the designers are told HA HA, no challenge for YOU today, you guys are going to a party tonight and we will have not one, but two special guests and that's when you'll get your challenge. Then Heidi, wearing a very large pink and paisley scarf as a very short dress, gives them a nasty smile and a buh-bye and they are left to ponder the implications amongst themselves. Or maybe have a day off to sleep. That's what I'd do, anyway.

Exterior, night

We are outside of a bar. Inside, there is lots and lots and lots of champagne and the remaining five designers. Doesn't look like much of a par-tay to me, but that's what champagne is for, n'est pas? Of course they pop the corks, and, in what is only his second slip of the entire show, Michael literally pops the cork, and the wine spews everywhere. Dawg, that may be the way they open champers in the hood, but the correct way is to hold the cork and turn the bottle until the cork eases out and there is a slight pop, but the bubbles and the wine stay in the bottle where they are supposed to be. Note: both Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo-and-recovering-alcoholic and Preggers Laura are tossing it back tonight.

In comes Heidi, and intros the first of their two special guests, and it's ----- VINCENT!!!!

Well, children, you have never seen pouting and stink eye and displays of blatant unhappiness and sulking and what not like we see next, since the last time someone ate the red crayon in a pre-school coloring hour. And that's just Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo. He did show enough self control to not actually throw himself on the floor and pound his heels and fists and cry. But just barely. Instead, he settled for sulking on the settee like any old spoiled teenager. And when the second special guest proves to be Angela, well, sweetiedarlings, Kayne just gets on the settee with him and the two can barely be civil to each other, much less the rest of the gang.

The special benefit of winning a challenge (and Keith Malvoy being sent home for cheating, thus leaving the producers one designer short for elimination), it turns out, is a second chance. They each won a challenge, and so they get to come back for one last ride. The only caveat is that the only way they get to continue is to win the challenge. Otherwise? Back on the bus to East Jesus.

The party ends right there and then, with the two losers coming back into the mix. Some of the designers are more gracious about it than others. Imagine that.

Back at the Atlas, Laura explains to Angela how she, Angela, is only there because she rode to victory on the backs of Michael and Laura. Angela, true to form, disagrees and totally doesn't get that she would have lost had not the tasteful twosome grabbed those nasty little Signature Angela Fleurchons out of her mitts and limited her to a couple of them as buttons. Really? she asks. You think? Laura arches her perfect eyebrows, rolls her baby blues and says, DUH. Out here in television land, another million or so folks do the same and add, Oh, HELL to the yes, Angela.

Oh, yeah. the challenge. I almost forgot about it, what with all the drama and shit. A cocktail ensemble. In black and white. Only. And PS? The designers have to use every scrap of fabric they buy. If it's as large or larger than a postcard, they need to use it, somehow.

Angela asks Tim, before they go to Mood, if they can choose one or the other... he says, uh, no. Both. Black and white. Together. Remember this.

The Night of the Living Fleurchons

There is so much going on in this episode, that we don't even get to watch the designers shop. We go from sketching and kvetching to sewing. Laura is having a breakdown. She's lost her mojo. She's lost her ego. She's lost at sea and can't tell anymore what's good and what's bad. Speaking of which...

Vincent is sure he will win with a white top that looks like the Guggenheim Museum (better than it sounds) and a black eyelet slim skirt. He's bought way too much fabric and chooses to make a really awful, vee-shaped drape, uh, shawl to go with the dress. Vincent is hamstrung, too, by the fact that his model has been in a bicycle wreck on her way to the show, and he is given a new (also previously auf'ed) model as a replacement. She is nowhere near the same size as Jia, and splits every seam on his dress and he has to sew her in as she's getting hair and make up.

Uli is working with (don't be shocked!) black and white patterned flowy silks. Guess what? It's the same fucking dress, only short, and with sleeves that look like they aren't really sleeves, but opera-length gloves with no hands, only fluttery hand openings. Yeah. I didn't get it, either. It's Uli goes to Ren Fest, and it isn't particularly pretty. She makes an ugly necklace out of her extra fabric by stuffing a tube of one fabric with wads of other fabric and bunching it up at intervals to look like ginormous bead things. Woof.

Michael makes an asymetrical white dress with a huge black cumberbund with floral cut outs and add-ons and it is, as always with our man Michael, utter perfection on Nazri. Nazri must be hot stuff, because I actually know his model's name and the rest of them are just...the models. Michael lines a purse, or stuffs a purse, I couldn't really tell, with his extra fabric.

Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo makes something that is atrocious, even by his low standards. It's black faux-pleather footless thigh-highs and a micro miniskirted bo-ho blouse. It's mostly white with black patterning.

Laura invokes the name and spirit of Josephine Baker (HEY! That's my dog's name/namesake, and now I love Laura even more than ever) and makes a white sorta mini-baby doll dress with black lace overlay, black lace trim on the square neckline and long, sleek, daggery feathers and beading along the hemline. It is, as always, impeccably tailored. Sigh. She makes a purse with her scraps.

Kayne uses black and black only to make a bat-winged, boat necked dress with no back. It's held on or held together by a white shoelace going through giant tabs all around the cut-out back. It's worse than it sounds. Tim almost bitch-slaps Kayne when he discovers that the only white material Kayne has is "trims" and the way Tim says the word "trim" makes it sound very, very dirty indeed. He makes a purse with his left-over trims.

Angela has made... a mess. She's made a micro-shrug out of black vinyl (?), and a sloppy, backless, shapeless, sleeveless hot mess of what is supposed to be a dress to go under it. The collar of the micro-shrug looks like Dracula's cape got mugged by white fleurchons on the way to the runway, and they are breeding all over it. It's eating her model's face, in fact, and it is just worse than anything else out there, except maybe Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo's pleatherette thigh-highs. She's stuffed all her extra fabric into a crocodile mini-hatbox purse. The purse is from the Macy's accessory wall. Why she didn't make one of her stupid Signature Angela Fluerchon Covered sacks, instead? It's Angela, so who knows.

Don't Cry Out Loud

On the runway, the emergency back up judge tonight is Zac Posen, wearing a silver ascot. Oh, come on. Nina points out to Angela that one doesn't need to stuff material in a stiff, box-like purse to shape it, and that as far as she's concerned, Angela bent the rules so far that they snapped.

Michael Kors, in what is perhaps his first fashion faux-pas of the season, says that everything Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo has done till now just looks like Gwen Stefani, to which I call bullshit. Gwen may make some questionable fashion choices (a bustle on a mini-skirt?) but she would never, ever, ever be caught dead in those broke-ass pleatherette thigh-highs.

Michael also does a dead-on impersonation of Uli and her mantra, "I'm from Miami, I design for hot veather." I'm laughing so hard, that I almost spilled my cosmopolitan.

Zac Posen shows some spot-on analysis of what he's seeing out there on the runway, despite the fact that he dressed himself in a silver ascot.

Everyone hates the proportions on Vincent's homage to the Guggenheim, and when he uses the awful shawl thing to add length to his skirt it looks much, much, much better. I thought about it for a while, and I think he should have done a full, gored skirt with the extra material, and I think the contrast between a very structured white top and the black eyelet and black sateen fullness could have been a winner for him. Oh, well. I'm not one of the voices in his head.

The winner? Miss Laura, but it could just as easily have gone to Michael. Once more, the judges gushed over how this guy is a fashion natural, a genius; how his presentation is always flawless, from hair and make up to accessories. I think they just didn't want him to win three.

Since you had to win to stay, Angela and Vincent go bye-bye once more. Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo and Kayne are the bottom two. Kayne is (finally) given the boot for having, in White Trash vernacular, all of his taste in his mouth. In his final interview, Kayne lets us all know that he really isn't a bitch, he just played one on tee-vee. Yeah. Nice try, Nancy. Ain't none of us believin' that shit.

The only thing that could have made this episode any better would have been to see Jeffrey-the-pinheaded-Shmoo get tossed out on his shaved eyebrow. And one other thing. Dude. The fly-eye sunglasses with the rhinestones? Did Kayne give you those, because a) they are SO not rock and roll, and b) they are SO gay.

Whew. That was exhausting. PS... the closet was finished just in time for Project Runway, and I got to sleep in my real bed last night. Like I said at the beginning of this entry, was last night great, or what.

The closet rehab is a real-life example of Murphy's Law in action. It started out so easily, and quickly descended into a domino fall of small annoyances, work stoppages and but firsts.

The demolition went smoothly, with lots and lots of bang hammering and prybar work. FUN! But the DYIers who owned this house before always did things the easy way, so when I pulled the shelves out, great gobs of concrete wall came out too. They used nails into concrete rather than drilling and using concrete mollys.

So. Off to Home Depot for spackle, and new paint (gotta paint over the big gaps where previously there hung wooden shelves and shelf supports) (also: the big patches of spackle), and a concrete drill bit, and a level, and what girl doesn't want a plumb line? and then there in the back of the tool corral was a 100-piece accessory kit for my Dremel, and maybe a little light for the closet? Yes. That was the HD run.

Did you know that at Home Depot, in the paint section, there are usually cans of rejected colors or extra cans of stuff that people brought back and it's all marked at $5 a gallon? I've bought Ralph Lauren there, in the exact color I would have had mixed, had it not been sitting in the reject pile for cheap. This weekend, I found what looked like an exact match for the shallow-end-of-the-swimming-pool aqua that is my bedroom. Once it dried, however, it's more of a robin's egg blue. A little more grayish/blueish/lavenderish color. Who cares, it's in the closet. And feel free to make your own jokes about that.

Back home, where I spackle and sand, rinse and repeat, wait for the spackle to dry and then paint the closet. It is now 10:30 at night and the end of day 2 of the closet project.

On Monday, the RLA hunts and gathers dinner for us, and after we eat, the RLA puts on the safety glasses and filter mask and has at the rear wall with the concrete drill. It is slow and painful, only partly because he is attempting to drill into 53-year old concrete, and he finally sucks it up and uses the old, 1950's drill with a cord, as opposed to the sleek, battery-powered model he loves. Whaddaya know? The old drill with a cord has way more torque and the rest of the job goes smoothly. On to the side wall, where we discover that: at the height we need to drill, it is NOT concrete, but drywall. The only thing we can figure is that the walls are concrete up to the level of the eaves, and the sloping part of the wall, where it goes to the roof peak, is drywall. Why? Ask the guy who built this dump house in 1954.

It's now 10:30 on Monday night, and we are done in. Back to the trundle bed in the living room, which is getting more comfortable every night.

On Tuesday, after his morning class, the RLA heads off to the Home Depot/Container Store for the correct anchors for drywall and the correct drill bit for same. No extra Dremel toys, boohoo. Once I get home from work, the next phase of the operation begins. We measure, level and drill. It's going well, too well. Sure enough, we hit another snag: there is a block of Dade County Pine behind the wall on the RLA's side of the closet. NOTHING drills through Dade County Pine. NOTHING. Nada. Zip. Forget it, it's only one screw, and it's not on the end of the rail. I manage to break not one, but two lamps in the closet during this portion of the evening.

Finally, I break out the wet vac and a mop, and I clean, clean, and re-clean all the plaster dust and random dog fur and regular dust from all surfaces in the closet. We wait for it to dry. We go back in. We begin to hang the vertical supports, and. There is a 4x4 cross beam that extends from side wall to side wall. We don't know why. We think it may be a weight-bearing structure, sort of like a flying buttress, but we're not sure, and we sure as hell are not going to take it down. It's in the middle of the closet, depth-wise. It, of course, interferes with installing the vertical supports.

Out comes the Dremel (I LOVE that tool) and the RLA carves out another set of notches. We hang the vertical supports. All that's left is to hang the actual shelves and clothes rods, and build and install the drawers. But, you know what? It's now 10:30pm and the RLA and I don't even have enough energy left to argue about whether or not we should continue. I'm asleep on the trundle, dog at my side (or head. or feet.) by the time he finishes brushing his teeth.

Tonight is the final push, and if my clothes aren't hung up in the closet by the time Project Runway starts, I'm just going to give up, call the trundle my bedroom and accept the fact that when I say closet, what I really mean is the pile of clothes on what used to be my bed.